Sub Focus on His New album, the Rise of Drum and Bass in the US, and His Various Influences

Sub Focus On New Album & Spreading The Gospel Of DnB In The US: “It’s Just Exciting” By  Lacey Cohen Published 22 minutes ago

Lacey Cohen is a lifelong student, writer, editor, music fanatic, and massive advocate for the Oxford Comma. She has been playing guitar for 16 years, boasts a 13-year-old Spotify library complete with playlists for just about any mood, and is well-versed in the language of nearly every genre of music. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in English and a minor in gender and health, and she graduated from Long Island University with an MFA in creative writing and publishing with a focus in prose writing. Lacey is currently based in Brooklyn, but she is a true and proud Michigander at heart.

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Drum and bass is having a moment, or so I've been told by my dance music aficionado editor extraordinaire. The '90s derivative dance music genre originated in the United Kingdom, and it has only continued to evolve and grow from there. It's taken quite some time, however, for that growth and evolution to reach the United States—where DnB artists across the pond have been putting out platinum singles for decades, the US fanbase has been slow to catch up.

We are absolutely in a new era for the genre in 2025, with DnB artists finally staking their claims on the main stage at American festivals like Electric Forest, EDC Orlando, and even Coachella. This high-energy, uptempo charge is being led predominantly by English DJ and Producer, Nick Douwma, better known as Sub Focus. Alongside fellow DnB artists 1991, Culture Shock, and Dimension, known collectively as supergroup Worship, Sub Focus was an integral part of the first ever drum and bass headlining show at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

2025 was a phenomenal year for Douwma to say the least, and it's not over yet, neither in the chronological sense nor the metaphorical one. The DJ's fourth solo album, released today, November 21, marks yet another massive step forward in his career, "Now, I'm feeling more comfortable just being like this is my style, this is what I'm about. It's another theme I've noticed, I've sort of drilled down into my niche and genre a little bit more."

The vocal-driven Contact boasts a wealth of different sounds and influences, with a whole slew of collaborators across any number of different genres of music. Sub Focus' 2025 LP simply reeks of confidence and excitement, firing on all cylinders and rising to the occasion of global dominance as DnB slowly starts to take over in the States: "It's just exciting to be spreading the gospel of Drum and Bass."

Screen Rant: I know sci-fi has been a big influence on you in your art, so what are some pieces or aspects of sci-fi culture that inspire you?

Sub Focus: I've been reflecting recently on what I was surrounded by when I was growing up, and one of the things was a lot of sci-fi novels. I ended up absorbing a lot of that. It wasn't so much films or anything more conventional like that, but it was a lot of books that were around when I was when I was a kid and a young teenager that I was just picking up and reading. That was around the same time that I was also getting into drum and bass, which was very new in the late 90s, and that genre was also channeling this incredible cyber punk, futuristic aesthetic, and I was just kind of wrapped by how different and alien the music sounded.

SR: What about any sci-fi inspirations for Contact?

SF: The whole album art concept basically revolves around the real-life Voyager golden record, which we sent out into space in the late 70s, I believe. So, me and the graphic designers that I've always worked with, we decided to kind of imagine what a kind of golden record would be like, and what would that look like if we were sent one back as a kind of reply? That was what the initial artwork concept was about. I've always really enjoyed imagining alien languages, like these strange hieroglyphics that we put on the cover. I mean, Arrival is a great sci-fi film example of this, where it's kind of imagining the challenge of trying to figure out what an alien language might be. I just find these themes really inspiring, and I feel like those things combine very well with the sort of futuristic sound of the music that I like to make.

SR: How do you view this album in relation to the rest of your work?

SF: I think because the genre is growing in terms of its audience, it's really allowed me to work with some more established and bigger artists and people, like Grimes, who I collaborated with on "Entwined," she's somebody that I've thought I would love to work with for many years, or someone like John Summit [which was] a real honor and that's exposed me to a lot more people in the States. I've also become very comfortable just setting out my stores like 'This is my sound,' with this album. It's all pretty hard and full on, big and energetic. I think with some of my previous albums, when I look back, I was obsessed with trying to prove to people that I could make loads of different types of music. On my second album, Torus, I had people like Avici playing one of the songs and Skrilllex playing on another, and that was very cool to me at the time. I wanted to prove I could make any genre of dance music, but now I'm feeling more comfortable just being like this is my style, this is what I'm about. It's another theme I've noticed, I've sort of drilled down into my niche and genre a little bit more.

SR: I think this album is definitely as much an invitation to new fans as it is a reminder to old fans why they're fans in the first place. Could you speak on that a little bit and just give a message to new fans and new fans to drum and bass as a whole?

SF: That's quite a hard question actually, but I'm always trying to show the bits of the genre I really love to people. I definitely have an instinct to try and make stuff that I feel like has wide appeal. I love when I make a song and lots of people sing it back. I think that sometimes in dance music you can become obsessed with being very underground, and I'm definitely not shy to use big rifts and make things catchy, you know, music that would work on big stages. It's hard to say what I'd say to new fans, but I'm hoping more and more people discover it, and that more people fall in love with the genre and go on to look at more artists within the genre. Within drum and base, there's a whole universe of different artists, and all sorts of subgenres I'd recommend people check [out]. Particularly in the States, I've been doing a lot of shows with three of my friends, we have a group together called Worship where we all play together, so obviously I'm a big fan of the other acts in Worship. I mean, there are so many different styles of drum and bass.

SR: Now that you've conquered the UK and are essentially starting to do the same in the US, what are some short-term goals that you have across the pond? Red Rocks and being the first drum and bass artists to headline a show there is obviously a massive accomplishment, but do you have any other specific goals or milestones that you're hoping to achieve here in the States?

SF: Red Rocks was a big one on our vision board of where we wanted to go with this, so it feels amazing to check that one off the list. With the Worship guys, we're also playing Coachella together next year, that's a huge one, and we're doing Ultra main stage together as well. So we just want to continue to grow things and hopefully play some festival main stages in the States, but we also want to travel a lot. I think we're starting to see some bigger stuff in Asia as well. It's just exciting to be spreading the gospel of drum and bass together.

SR: Do you have a favorite set that you've done or a favorite festival or venue you've played so far?

SF: I think when we did EDC Orlando as Worship, and that really felt like, whoa. This is suddenly, like we're playing to 50,000 people on the main stage of a US festival. That felt like a 'We've arrived' moment. In the UK, Glastonbury Festival is always a massive one. I just played one of my favorite after-hours stages there called Icon, I also did my production show Circular Sounds at Alexandra Palace in London in March, that one's a 10,000 capacity venue and London is my hometown, so that was a pretty special one, too.

SR: That's really cool. There's definitely got to be something cool about playing in your hometown at a place that you grew up going to.

SF: Yeah, for sure. It's kind of intense because a lot of friends come to those shows, I mean, like afterwards, in the bar, it almost felt like I was getting married or something. It's a lot, [but] it's a really nice experience.

SR: How did you decide who to collaborate with on Contact?

SF: Fireboy DML, who I worked with on a couple of songs, he's a massive Afrobeats artist. I was playing him these songs in the studio, and he was just going absolutely wild because he'd never really heard anything like that type of music before. In the studio [he] was incredibly vibey. He was just very excited to be making this type of music, and he is a super charismatic, fun person to be around. On the track "Ecuador" that we made, he was basically just freestyling, it kind of like it felt like he had made it up on the spot, and there were all these lyrics about being in this crazy block party in South America, and he painted this picture of this scene lyrically, which I absolutely loved. Working with Grimes was super cool as well, I felt like her sound really aligns with mine.

SR: Did you have a favorite collaborator?

SF: It's hard to pick a favorite, but I think when the writing process flows really nicely, that's often the tracks that I like the best. I can't decide whether that's just because some tracks take longer to write. It's like the ones that are shorter to write, you almost like them more because they were less of a hassle to get to the finish line, you know? But tracks like "So Many Colours," which is the second song of the album, that's another big favorite of mine. My friend Poppy Baskcomb, who sings on the track, she sent me this vocal idea with her and a sort of bass sound, very minimal sort of idea, and I could immediately hear how I wanted it to sound as a song. So sometimes, the songs that I like the best are the ones where the process was really smooth, you know.

SR: What is your creative process? Does it differ from album to album or set to set?

SF: It really varies, one of the things I'll do is just listen to tons of stuff. Initially, it's about being kind of a musical magpie, just finding bits of things that you like and sort of combining them. I might hear a specific sound, and I'll be like, 'how was that made,' you know? I know lots of songwriters, sometimes they'll send me the grain of an idea, and I'll be like, I know what I want to do with that. My normal week is that I'm DJing on the weekends, then I'll be in the studio from Monday to Friday, and I'll quite often do a couple of sessions per week. I'll have people in to collaborate, it'll often be vocalists, and we'll try and be a bit experimental. There's loads of weird tricks I try and do, fun things that I mess around with in the studio to come up with something that feels unique and different.

SR: How have other genres of music shaped your work, and how important is it for you to have those influences on your music?

SF: They're all like genres of music that I've really gotten into at one or other time in my life. I think specifically the trance kind of stuff really reminds me of growing up in the UK in the nineties and hearing that kind of stuff when I was a teenager. So I guess you kind of accumulate all these influences and try and sort of mash them together in a way that's not too obvious. I think on a track like "Roll Too Deep," which is one of the more kind of hard dance floor tracks on the album, I was sort of trying to channel trance, but also like some kind of early 90s—it used to be called 'hip house' where you'd get raps over house music 4/4 beats. There were all these different weird little subgenres that I love to reference in my music.

SR: Personally, I think that's why I really enjoyed the album so much. There's definitely something for everyone to find in love in it, which I really admire.

SF: I definitely like to have a bit of a melting point of different influences. I think if you make dance music, it's gotta be quite instant, it's gotta work in a climate and environment where everything's happening very quickly. You don't want to overload people, but you wanna give people enough new elements every so often to keep things going. And sometimes, you're almost deliberately being very repetitive, like "Let Your Body Rock," which is towards the end of the album. It's really a song I made for my live sets, taking influence from techno where you want everything to be really hypnotic and kind of lull you into this hypnotic state.

SR: I know challenging the confines of your genre has been an important part of your career thus far. How do you think you did that specifically on this album, and how do you hope to continue doing that going forward?

SF: I think I'm always just excited by trying to figure out what's new and what hasn't been done before. That's what really excites me. So it's an exciting time for me now having finished it, because I'm like, okay, where do we go next? Like what's the new kind of sound that we're gonna play with? That's the great enjoyment of all of this. It's just playing around and seeing what sort of combinations haven't been done yet.

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